Rodney Evans in Vision Portraits (Stimulus Pictures)

Rodney Evans, who wrote and directed an indie feature about gay life in the black community, 2004’s Brother to Brother, has now made a deeply personal documentary about three blind and visually impaired artists working in several mediums. Evans follows the subjects through their daily lives and their creative processes and at times utilizes visual tricks (overexposure and flares) to give viewers an idea what living with limited eyesight is like.

Photographer John Dugdale, whose photos have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Fine Art, and all over the world, has CMV retinitis and is HIV positive. He has a very slim field of vision, basically only being able to see what is directly in front of his face, but this does not render him unable to use a camera, since he can still see through the viewfinder. He also knows his equipment well enough to operate it by touch—which, by the way, is a large format 19th-century camera, through which he photographs some of his images onto albumen silver print, once the primary method for photos more than a hundred years ago.

The second subject is prolific dancer Kayla Hamilton, who received the Dancing While Black Fellowship from Angela’s Pulse, which creates and produces collaborative performance works, in 2017. On top of her busy dance schedule, she also teaches special education in the Bronx. Hamilton can’t see in one eye and has limited vision in the other. Much of her segment features her dancing, often with her eyes closed, as if she is tapping into something spiritual that sighted dancers may not be able to reach as easily.

Ryan Knighton wrote the acclaimed memoir Cockeyed, about going blind—he has retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative disorder—and has worked on the screenplay for the film adaptation as part of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. He has also written numerous comic essays and teaches creative writing at Capilano University in Vancouver. Known for his sense of humor, Knighton’s piece is perhaps the liveliest. Having come up in the punk rock scene, he claims you couldn’t pick a better person to deal with going blind than a punk rocker.

Now here’s the most unique aspect about Vision Portraits: the director himself is mostly blind. Between each of the sections profiling these artists, Evans comes back to his own story as the connective thread. Evans was diagnosed in 1997 with retinitis pigmentosa, the same as Knighton, and now only has 20 percent of his field of vision, and he has been taking trips to Germany to undergo an experimental procedure that may give him his vision back.

One reason why he set out to make this film is to question, does it even matter as an artist in a visual medium to have all of one’s sight? Perhaps an answer to this comes in the form of an anecdote told by Knighton, about a friend saying that once he went totally blind, he was happier than he had been during the lead-up to losing his sight, because he didn’t have to live with the constant anxiety of being partially blind anymore. This and other unique perspectives provide a much-needed dose of understanding.